More than 120 Republican leaders met virtually on Feb. 5 to discuss forming a third party or a new center-right faction
\nnews agency
\nWASHINGTON
\nA group of former Republican officials considering a new center-right political party to counter former President Donald Trump\u2019s influence would face steep challenges in shaking up a US political system that has favored two-party rule throughout its history.
\nReuters exclusively reported on Wednesday that more than 120 Republicans \u2014 including former elected officials, along with former administrators under Trump and former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush \u2014 met virtually on Feb. 5 to discuss forming a third party or a new center-right faction.
\nTwo of the most prominent anti-Trump Republicans in Congress \u2014 Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois \u2014 rejected the idea of a breakaway party in statements to Reuters on Thursday. Other Republican critics of Trump expressed similar skepticism \u2014 arguing a third party would accomplish little beyond splitting the votes of conservatives and helping Democrats get elected.
\nThe resistance to a third party among some of Trump\u2019s toughest Republican critics underscores the extreme difficulty of such a political revolt. Such an effort would require walking away from the Republican Party\u2019s massive political infrastructure \u2014 staff, money, connections and data on donors and voters \u2014 that would take years if not decades to build from scratch.
\nAn upstart party would also have little chance of succeeding without a charismatic leader who could capture the loyalties of millions of disaffected voters, said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser to the Republican primary campaign of Marco Rubio, a Senator from Florida, in 2016.
\n\u201cIf somebody was going to start a third party that was going to gain some traction, it would be Trump\u201d and not his opponents, said Conant.
\nKinzinger joined the Feb. 5 video conference of the anti-Trump group and spoke for about five minutes, a spokeswoman told Reuters. But the congressman wants to \u201creform the party from within,\u201d she said. He has recently formed a new political action committee to support Republican primary challengers running against pro-Trump House Republicans such as Matt Gaetz, of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia.
\nCheney told Reuters in a statement that she opposes \u201cany effort to split the party,\u201d saying it would only make it easier for Democrats to enact policies that conservatives oppose.
\nBoth Cheney and Kinzinger were among just 10 House Republicans, a small minority, who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
\nA more likely outcome of an anti-Trump movement would be for centrist Republicans to try to purge Trumpism from within its own ranks, said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who recently quit the party in protest of Trump and declared himself an independent.
\nA party of center-right conservatives could never create a broad enough coalition to win national elections, Jolly said. And Trump has effectively undercut his more moderate opponents among Republican voters, he said, by ridiculing them as \u201cNever Trumpers\u201d and \u201cRINOs\u201d (Republicans in Name Only).
\n\u201cIt\u2019s just impossible to escape the \u2018never Trump\u2019 label,\u201d he said.
\nOthers argue it would be much harder to wrest power over the Republican Party from Trump.
\n\u201cLet\u2019s not kid ourselves; we are not going to change this party,\u201d said Jim Glassman, a former undersecretary of state under George W. Bush.
\nGlassman gave a five-minute presentation on the Feb. 5 call advocating for a new party. Any effort to reclaim the party would be \u201ca soul-deadening slog,\u201d he told participants.
\nHe told Reuters on Thursday that he sees the Republican Party as now thoroughly in thrall to Trump \u2014 and beyond repair.
\n\u201cI thought, if Trump lost by 7 million votes, there may have been a chance to do that,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cBut events since the election have made clear that\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d
\nAsked on Wednesday about the discussions for a third party, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said: \u201cThese losers left the Republican Party when they voted for Joe Biden.\u201d
\nSplit on strategy
\nGlassman believes there are enough Republican donors who are disgusted with Trump and willing to finance a new party. He believes a new conservative party could also attract maybe one fifth of Republican voters who disapprove of Trump, along with some independents and Democrats. Further, he said, running third-party candidates in House and Senate races would force the Trumpist candidates to tack to the center in general elections and temper the shrill partisanship of those races.
\nMany people at the Feb. 5 virtual gathering agreed with Glassman. In a poll of participants, about 40% of those in attendance supported creating an entirely new party, according to one source with direct knowledge of the discussions. About 20% favored creating a faction within the party, and an equal number supported creating a faction outside the party, though it remained unclear exactly how such an independent faction would operate.
\nWhile they disagreed on strategy, participants in the meeting said, attendees united on the need to organize and advocate for a return to \u201cprincipled conservatism\u201d that prizes the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution, ideals they believe Trump has violated.
\nAmong the group at the Feb. 5 meeting was Elizabeth Neumann, former deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump. She\u2019s enraged at Republican lawmakers\u2019 continued support for Trump in the wake of his stolen-election claims, which she had repeatedly warned \u2014 before the Jan. 6 US Capitol riots \u2014 could lead to violence. Now she wants to politically target the lawmakers who voted, in the hours after the deadly insurrection, to overturn the presidential election result \u2014 and she\u2019s open to any strategy that might work.
\n\u201cI hear arguments that we should break off and form a new party, or we should stay inside the party. There will come a time when this crystallizes,\u201d Neumann told Reuters on Thursday. \u201cAt the moment, I\u2019m more focused on the individual people and holding them accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 120 Republican leaders met virtually on Feb. 5 to discuss forming a third party or a new center-right faction news agency WASHINGTON A group of former Republican officials considering a new center-right political party to counter former President Donald Trump\u2019s influence would face steep challenges in shaking up a US political system that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-sports"],"yoast_head":"\n